The Hidden Cause of Acne: How Toxic Water Is Affecting Your Health and What You Can Do about It

To my mother

. . . behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.

MITCH ALBOM

The Hidden Cause of

ACNE

This intriguing personal account of one woman’s experience with acne is a detailed case report that could have been published in the peer-reviewed literature. Using scientific deduction, careful observations, and self-experimentation—a process used by Nobel Laureates such as Barry Marshall, Werner Forssmann, and Ralph Steinman—Melissa Gallico figured out that the cause of her chronic acne was the fluoride added to her drinking water. The fact that other people who read her book also report that their acne cleared up when they switched to fluoride-free beverages and foods suggests this is an area that deserves rigorous clinical investigation.

HARDY LIMEBACK, D.D.S., PH.D., HEAD OF PREVENTIVE DENTISTRY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO (RET.) AND PAST PRESIDENT OF THE CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR DENTAL RESEARCH

This is an astounding piece of work and a ‘must-read’ for people wanting the true story about how and why and to what terrible effect the addition of fluoride to drinking water is having. As Gallico’s riveting personal story attests, public water fluoridation is, in essence, a hazardous waste management tool that is damaging our health in ways we have yet to fully comprehend. Her deep research into this area and the clear, arresting manner in which she presents it is a valuable, even crucial, contribution to ending the antiquated and dangerous practice of adding fluoride to public drinking water.

BILL HIRZY, PH.D., SENIOR SCIENTIST AT THE EPA (RET.) AND PAST PRESIDENT OF THE EPA UNION OF PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYEES

Melissa Gallico has authored an engaging book, one that is enjoyable to read despite the seriousness of the subject matter. As she notes, ‘it doesn’t take a degree in medicine’ (or dentistry or science) to appreciate the importance of personal observations in matters of personal health, or to understand the potential consequences of one-size-fits-all medication of the public through the drinking water supply. Fluoride sensitivity (including dermatological, endocrinological, gastrointestinal, and other effects) has been in the medical literature for decades, unrefuted, and deserves the wider awareness that Gallico’s work will bring.

KATHLEEN M. THIESSEN, PH.D., SENIOR SCIENTIST AT OAK RIDGE CENTER FOR RISK ANALYSIS AND COAUTHOR OF THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL’S 2006 REPORT FLUORIDE IN DRINKING WATER

Acknowledgments

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

CARL SAGAN

I MIGHT HAVE BAKED A PIE, but I literally have a universe of people to thank for growing the apples, building the stove, and driving me to the bake sale. These are just a few of them.

Thank you to the good people at Google who lay a universe of information at the feet of my curious mind. Wikipedia, same. Thank you to the Fluoride Action Network for posting insane amounts of information about fluoride online. I never could have figured out how to heal my acne without it. Thank you to the Iodine Doctors and others like them who put their reputations and careers on the line every day for their patients by questioning the established health dogma. Thank you to Amazon for connecting me with the books and products I needed to put my theories to the test, and then for creating a home for my book when the time came to write about it all. Thank you to Apple for giving me the tools I needed to gather all that information and assemble it into a finished product. I will love you forever or until something better comes along. You know how it goes.

To the entire team at Inner Traditions, including the designers, the production team, Jon Graham, Kelly Bowen, Patricia Rydle, Manzanita Carpenter, Erica Robinson, Ashley Kolesnik, Jeanie Levitan, Elizabeth Wilson, and especially my smart and kindhearted project editor Kayla Toher, thank you for your diligent work on this book, for taking a chance on a first-time author, and for being so nice.

To Stephen Harrod Buhner, thank you for teaching me how to follow a golden thread. I yanked that thread until the whole story unraveled and then used it to sew a sparkly gold dress. I am honored and humbled each time I look at your name on the cover next to mine. Thank you for believing in my work and for everything you did to help it find a wider audience.

Thank you to Hardy Limeback for your encouragement and support. Someday I will tell the story of the first time you emailed me, and people won’t believe it. Thanks to Bill Hirzy and several of my analyst colleagues (you know who you are) for reading my entire 8,500-word exposé on raisins and providing constructive criticism. To my blogging buddy and eventual beta reader, Elizabeth Walling of The Nourished Life, thank you for reading an early copy of the manuscript for The End of Acne and providing valuable feedback.

To my original editor, Darlene Musso, thank you for conspiring with me on this project, for sharing your candid thoughts and ideas, for loving me like I grew up as part of the family, and for the perfect Christmas card you sent before you even knew I was writing a book about Inuits and cetaceans and language and the ocean. It hung above my writing desk and inspired me every day.*133 In case anyone was in doubt, this is hard proof you are an angel.

Thank you to my parents for telling me when I was a little girl (before I was old enough to mistake truth for cliché) that I can do anything I set my mind to. Thanks for the happiness in your voice when I call you on the phone and you realize it’s me on the other side of the line. For how excited I know you will be when I tell you I wrote a book. For thinking the world of me. For your endless love. For all that and more. Thank you. It worked.

To sweet Gia, who reminds me every day that Homo sapiens are not the only beings being. And to my Marco, thank you for feeding me while I wrote this book. And for listening to me talk about raisins. And for never getting tired (or at least pretending not to get tired) of listening to me talk about raisins. I always say you are my dream man. But in truth, I could not have dreamed of a man as perfect for me as you are.

Finally, to everyone past and future who reads my story and realizes it is their own. Your testimonials are the reason this book exists. Thank you for sharing them with me. Thank you for reading even to this very last word.

Please, let’s not make this goodbye.

www.HiddenCauseofAcne.com/email

Contents

Cover Image

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

THE STORY OF ACNE

THE (PARTIAL) STORY OF ME

ENGINEERS AND ANECDOTES: A LOVE STORY

Part One: Cause (n.)

Chapter 1. Why Kitavan Islanders Don’t Have Acne, but Americans Do

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW

GORILLAS IN THE MIST

ONCE UPON A DREAM

A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY

Chapter 2. F: The Invisible Element behind the Modern Acne Epidemic

HOW THE WEST WAS WON

IN FLUORIDE WE TRUST

REDCOATS AND REBELS

Chapter 3. Rethinking the Cause of Your Acne

TALES FROM GOTHAM CITY

LOST IN THE HUNDRED ACRE WOOD

CHAPTER 42

HAPPILY EVER AFTER

Part Two: Affect (v.)

Chapter 4. Stopping Breakouts Before They Start

THE DRINK ME POTIONS

THE EAT ME CAKES

IMPOSSIBLE THINGS AT BREAKFAST

CATERPILLARS BLOWING SMOKE

A JABBERWOCK AMONG US

Chapter 5. Healing Breakouts Overnight

A POISONED PART OF YOUR WORLD

A MERMAID VISITS OZ

FROM BEAUTY TO THE BEAST AND BACK

Chapter 6. Becoming Acne-Proof

THE MAGIC DRAGON WHO LIVES BY THE SEA

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON

THE LAND BEFORE TIME

Afterword

Appendix

Footnotes

References

About the Author

About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company

Books of Related Interest

Copyright & Permissions

Index

Foreword

A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO I wrote a book on the crafting of nonfiction. It was a labor of love (never destined to sell as well as my work on Lyme disease or the treatment of resistant bacteria). Still, it remains to this day my personal favorite. So, it is especially gratifying that every so often someone writes me to say they’ve been inspired to write their own book. And every so often, someone follows up by asking to send me a copy of the book they have written. Nevertheless, when I received Melissa Gallico’s email, and finally reached its lower reaches, its working title was less than imposing: The End of Acne.

My book on the crafting of nonfiction (Ensouling Language, Inner Traditions, 2010) plays in some depth with the subtleties and beauty of language, examining in detail the steps involved in evoking its luminous possibilities. So, it was with some trepidation that I said, Sure, send me the book. When it arrived, and I finally found some time to spend with it, the trepidation had, if anything, increased. How, I wondered, could anyone write a fascinating account of acne . . . or its end? Determined to make my best effort, I grimly prepared myself for a short but tiresome slog through dense, unpoetic prose.

Some two hours later, when I finally awakened from the pages in my hands, I found I had been on a rather incredible journey. The writing was truly enjoyable, the topic engaging, and the implications rather far-reaching. Still, the most riveting element of the book was the mind of the author, whose clear thinking shone through the text in a way that I rarely experience, even in writers much more seasoned than her, some of whom are quite famous.

Gallico takes you on a journey into the murky world of some rather common medical unclarities. Many medical interventions, formulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were based on quite erroneous premises. The understandings of the day could not have foreseen the pervasive physiological impacts of minute traces of chemicals in our waters or that many substances that were, at the time, thought to be benign are anything but. Nor did they foresee the tremendous ecological impacts (both micro and macro) that corporate capitalism would have on our world in their drive for profits from the production and distribution of chemicals, including those we know as pharmaceuticals.

Gallico’s clarity of thought, her penetrating perceptions about the impacts of some of these chemicals on our lives (honed in her work as an intelligence specialist for the FBI), illustrates just how problematic some of the medical science that shapes our lives is. And, as well, the tremendous damage it can sometimes do to the people who live in the midst of the stories it tells. Stories that, as is inevitable with these kinds of things, are altered by new understandings all too slowly.

From the first paragraphs the power of her storytelling is manifest. Our understanding of the world is shaped through story, she begins. And from there the story she found in her search to understand what had been happening to her unfolds. It’s compelling. You hold in your hands the earliest work of a writer that the world needs to hear more from. I hope you enjoy her company as much as I did. Her voice resonated in my mind for months afterward. I hope, too, that if you suffer from the kind of damaging acne that she struggled with for much of her life, you, too, will find surcease in the solutions she offers. You have an able guide in Melissa Gallico.

STEPHEN HARROD BUHNER, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF 19 BOOKS, INCLUDING HEALING LYME, THE SECRET TEACHINGS OF PLANTS, AND PLANT INTELLIGENCE AND THE IMAGINAL REALM

INTRODUCTION

Once Upon a Time

WE TELL OURSELVES science is king, but our understanding of the world is shaped through story. We tell stories about the past and call it history. We tell stories about the present and call it news. Our stories about how to act, think, and live are called culture. And our stories about how the natural world works are called science.

We can tell science is a story because of how it changes over time. The Earth is flat. Now it is round. Airplanes are impossible.*1 Now they are commonplace. The natural world didn’t change, but our understanding of it did. It would be naive to think our current story is a complete picture of how things are.

Every story has a storyteller. Like a musician conjuring a new piece of music into existence, it is the storyteller who decides who the main characters will be, where the story will start, how it will end, and every detail in between. The storyteller is responsible for deciding which storylines to pursue, which to disregard, and which will be overlooked entirely. In most cases, a story has multiple storytellers whose voices weave together in a cacophony of overlapping assertions and ideas. It is up to the audience to decide which version to retell.

THE STORY OF ACNE

The story of acne commonly told today goes something like this: when your pores become clogged with dead skin cells and other debris, they trap oil and bacteria in your skin causing an infection in the form of a breakout. The story has variations. Sometimes hormones are involved, sometimes they are not. Sometimes genetics are involved, sometimes they are not. Sometimes diet is a trigger, but everyone is different. One aspect shared by these acne stories is the lack of a happy ending—there is no cure for chronic acne, only ongoing treatment.

With the story of acne, the dominant storytellers are dermatologists. As physicians who specialize in disorders of the skin, dermatologists pull their main characters from the pages of their textbooks: pores, skin cells, sebum (oil). The farther away a character is from the skin, the less likely a dermatologist is to include it in the story. Their heroes are chosen from the typical doctor’s bag: creams, pills, needles. The antagonists are the villains du jour: dirt and bacteria. Dermatologists draw on statistics from the stage as they set it. According to the American Academy of Dermatology’s Acne Stats and Facts webpage, 85 percent of people between the ages of 12 and 24 experience acne. Is that 85 percent of young people everywhere, or 85 percent of certain young people from a certain time and place?

Another major voice in the acne story is the commercial skincare industry. Together with dermatologists, they are busy researching products and treatments to cure acne and capture a portion of the $120 billion global skincare market. But for a treatment to be profitable, it must be capable of being bottled and sold or administered in a doctor’s office. The standards are even higher for the biggest source of funding in acne research: the pharmaceutical industry. If it can’t be patented, what’s the point?

But what if the cure for acne cannot be bottled, sold, administered, or patented? Would we ever find it? If the main characters are not present on the surface of the skin or even listed on an ingredient label, would we ever notice them?

THE (PARTIAL) STORY OF ME

I am not a dermatologist, an aesthetician, a nutritionist, or any other type of health professional. I’m an intelligence specialist at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Washington, D.C.*2 You might think I am an unlikely author for a book on acne, but looking back at my career and educational experiences, I now realize they were perfectly tailored to solve a case like this one.

As an undergraduate student at Georgetown University, I majored in Science, Technology, and International Affairs. I am intrigued by the ways we choose to develop our scientific understanding, why certain ideas take hold and others do not, and how the repercussions of scientific advancements are felt on a global scale. I pursued a career in intelligence because, as a young college student in the late 1990s, I looked around at the world and saw terrorism as the biggest upcoming threat to our wellbeing. After graduation, I entered the United States Navy and later transitioned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as an intelligence analyst.

During my time at the FBI, I was selected to be a Fulbright scholar at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, where I worked as a research assistant to Alex Schmid, former head of the Terrorism Prevention Branch of the United Nations. At St. Andrews, I specialized in a branch of International Studies called Constructivism, which involves uncovering hidden assumptions and exploring alternative scenarios through the deconstruction of discourse and linguistics—in other words, the analysis of stories.

After completing my graduate degree in Scotland, I was offered a position at the Boeing Company in Washington, D.C. Most people think of Boeing as an airplane manufacturer, but it also has an Intelligence and Analytics branch. At Boeing, I was contracted to work full time at the FBI, where I instruct an intelligence class at Quantico and travel throughout the country providing analytical support for FBI cases.

My area of expertise is helping investigators uncover critical information by assisting them in asking questions. Intelligence analysis involves more than just collecting the facts and assembling them into a finished product. People tend to think of analysis as a puzzle, but it is more like trying to assemble a puzzle when half the pieces are missing. Additionally, for reasons that may or may not be malicious in nature, someone mixed in pieces designed to look like they belong to your puzzle when they actually do not. Plus there is no picture on top of the box to guide your efforts.

Whether analyzing the cause of acne or the extent of a terrorist threat, the challenges of thoughtful analysis are substantial. One of the main reasons intelligence analysis is so difficult is because it deals with ambiguous and incomplete data. When we are confronted with inadequate information, we rely on certain subconscious mental processes to interpret it. We want to believe our thinking is guided by rationality and logic, but studies of psychology (and history) show otherwise. The human brain relies not on fact but on mental models—a type of story we tell ourselves—to make sense of the world. These models are essential in the functioning of our daily lives, but they also lead to common cognitive pitfalls. Professional analysts spend their careers trying to develop skill sets to help avoid these analytic traps. We never fully succeed, but gains can be made in trying.

In Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, a foundational work in the field, CIA veteran Richards Heuer (2013) explains one of the most fundamental principles of perception that affects analysis: We tend to perceive what we expect to perceive. (Notice he says we see what we expect to see, not what we want to see.) This basic tenet of analytic theory is well known, and still we are surprised when we catch it in action, especially in ourselves.

Perhaps the most famous such experiment was conducted by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons (2009). If you are unfamiliar with their work, you might find it worthwhile to participate in the experiment yourself by viewing their ninety-second video at www.HiddenCauseofAcne.com/basketball.  (But do it now without reading a single word further or else your results will be skewed. Go ahead, I’ll wait . . .)

The experiment shows that half of the thousands of people tasked to count the number of passes in a basketball video fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking across the middle of the stage and beating his fists on his chest. People who miss seeing the gorilla insist it was not there when they are told about it afterward. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains, the gorilla study illustrates two important points about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness (2011, 24).

In writing The Hidden Cause of Acne, my hope is to make apparent the invisible gorilla on the stage. Once you know to look for him, he is difficult to miss. After struggling with cystic acne for over twenty years, sometimes I wonder myself why it took me so long to put the pieces together. But hindsight is its own type of bias.

Some people might dismiss my experience with acne as anecdotal or balk at the idea of a health book written by a nonmedical professional. My response to such notions is best illustrated with a story.

ENGINEERS AND ANECDOTES: A LOVE STORY

Samuel P. Langley should have invented the airplane. He held an assistantship at the Harvard College Observatory, taught mathematics at the United States Naval Academy, was a frequent guest at the White House, and was named Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1887. In an effort to create the world’s first manned flying machine, Langley spent a decade studying the fledgling field of aeronautics research before receiving a grant of $50,000 from the War Department to develop his Aerodrome design. It was the largest research project ever funded by the department at the time. Langley had access to the top scientists in the world and the latest technical research. He had hefty financial backing and the full support of the United States government (does this story sound familiar?). Yet after seventeen years of effort, Langley was unable to figure out one little detail: how to make the darn thing fly.

Orville and Wilbur Wright, on the other hand, had no such competitive advantages. Neither brother had a college education. Technically, they didn’t even have high school diplomas. They funded their interest in flying machines with proceeds from their bicycle shop while they worked to build the world’s first airplane as a hobby in their spare time. When they wanted information on the latest aeronautics research, their best option was to send a written request to the government via the U.S. Postal Service and hope for a helpful response. Unlike Langley, they weren’t even able to bounce ideas off their best friend, Alexander Graham Bell, when they ran into a particularly vexing design challenge.

Yet on December 17, 1903, with the media and all esteemed aeronautical experts noticeably lacking in attendance, the Wright brothers’ manned flying machine flew for fifty-nine seconds over the dunes at Kitty Hawk. It took the Wright brothers just four years to create the Wright Flyer, but it took the U.S. government nearly forty years to admit the Wright Flyer, and not Langley’s Aerodrome, was the first manned, powered aircraft capable of flight.

In his bestselling book Mastery, Robert Greene explains why the Wright brothers succeeded while Samuel Langley and the U.S. government failed. Langley’s team was composed of specialists focused on making the most efficient parts: the most powerful engine; the lightest frame; the most aerodynamic wings. They had an expert military pilot too. This kind of specialization meant the person who designed the wings was different than the person who tested them in the air. Each crew member knew their specialty, but they could only think about how all the parts fit together in abstract terms. In contrast, the Wright brothers personally designed their machine, built it, flew it, crashed it, picked up the pieces, and designed it again. This process allowed them to rapidly uncover flaws in their design and ways to work them out. As Greene states, "it gave them a feel for the product that could never be had in the abstract" (2012, 219).

Hopefully the analogy I am drawing between the discovery of the airplane and the cure for acne is starting to become clear. In our story about the birth of aviation (and yes, there are other versions of the story where other flying machines flew first), we see how the Wright brothers’ approach was successful because it merged aeronautical theory with the physical world in a way Langley’s approach did not. This same approach can be applied to the problem of acne. Greene concludes, Whatever you are creating or designing, you must test and use it yourself. Separating out the work will make you lose touch with its functionality (2012, 219). The Wright brothers understood their flying machine from the inside out. It wasn’t just something they designed and built. It was something they experienced.

The experience of acne is wholly lacking in acne research. Individual accounts are dismissed as anecdotal (in a pejorative sense) and not worthy of consideration in serious study of the subject. Instead of mining anecdotal evidence for clues, acne researchers are preoccupied with producing expensive double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trials of prescribable treatments for publication in peer-reviewed journals. Or they focus on statistical analysis of epidemiological surveys that confuse correlation with causation and overlook nuanced complexities inherent in the study of the human body.

Engineers tend not to focus on this distinction between anecdotal and science-based evidence. When something seems to work in the real world—even if it was merely once upon a time—curiosity takes over and they tinker, test, and repeat until before they know it, they brought a new idea into being. No one told the Wright brothers their flying machine was anecdotal.

As someone who experiences acne, and not just studies it in the abstract, you have an advantage over the entire skincare industry in finding a cure. You can test your theories, make adjustments, and test them again at a pace the experts are incapable of matching. You know your test subject better than any outside researcher ever could; its history, its sensations, its environment are all intimately familiar to you. And because acne is something you experience, you will feel when you are onto something or when something is not right even before you identify the reason. In the story of acne, we are not the scientists. We are the engineers.

Truth is what stands the test of experience.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

PART ONE

Cause (n.)

1

Why Kitavan Islanders Don’t Have Acne,